Gina Haspel Observed Waterboarding at CIA Black Site, Psychologist Testifies

Carol Rosenberg and J. E. Barnes

The New York Times

Originally posted 4 JUN 22

During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the CIA in 2018, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a CIA black site in Thailand where al-Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the CIA officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former CIA director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected al-Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Haspel.

The CIA has never acknowledged Haspel’s work at the black site, and the use of the code name represented the court’s acceptance of an agency policy of not acknowledging state secrets — even those that have already been spilled. Former officials long ago revealed that she ran the black site in Thailand from October 2002 until December 2002, during the time al-Nashiri was being tortured, which Mitchell described in his testimony.

Guantánamo Bay is one of the few places where America is still wrestling with the legacy of torture in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Torture has loomed over the pretrial phase of the death penalty cases for years and is likely to continue to do so as hearings resume over the summer.

The info is here.

Psychologist Who Waterboarded for C.I.A. to Testify at Guantánamo

Carol Rosenberg
The New York Times
Originally posted 20 Jan 20

Here is an excerpt:

Mr. Mohammed’s co-defendants were subject to violence, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and rectal abuse in the prison network from 2002, when the first of them, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured, to 2006, when all five were transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay. They will also be present in the courtroom.

In the black sites, the defendants were kept in solitary confinement, often nude, at times confined to a cramped box in the fetal position, hung by their wrists in painful positions and slammed head first into walls. Those techniques, approved by George W. Bush administration lawyers, were part of a desperate effort to force them to divulge Al Qaeda’s secrets — like the location of Osama bin Laden and whether there were terrorist sleeper cells deployed to carry out more attacks.

A subsequent internal study by the C.I.A. found proponents inflated the intelligence value of those interrogations.

The psychologists were called by lawyers to testify for one of the defendants, Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi. All five defense teams are expected to question them about policy and for graphic details of conditions in the clandestine overseas prisons, including one in Thailand that for a time was run by Gina Haspel, now the C.I.A. director.

Mr. al-Baluchi’s lawyer, James G. Connell III, is spearheading an effort to persuade the judge to exclude from the trial the testimony of F.B.I. agents who questioned the defendants at Guantánamo in 2007. It was just months after their transfer there from years in C.I.A. prisons, and the defense lawyers argue that, although there was no overt violence during the F.B.I. interrogations, the defendants were so thoroughly broken in the black sites that they were powerless to do anything but tell the F.B.I. agents what they wanted to hear.

By law, prosecutors can use voluntary confessions only at the military commissions at Guantánamo.

The info is here.

It's not biology bro: Torture and the Misuse of Science

Shane O'Mara and John Schiemann
PsyArXiv Preprints
Last edited on December 24, 2018

Abstract

Contrary to the (in)famous line in the film Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA's torture program was not based on biology or any other science. Instead, the Bush administration and the CIA decided to use coercion immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then veneered the program's justification with a patina of pseudoscience, ignoring the actual biology of torturing human brains. We reconstruct the Bush administration’s decision-making process from released government documents, independent investigations, journalistic accounts, and memoirs to establish that the policy decision to use torture took place in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks without any investigation into its efficacy. We then present the pseudo-scientific model of torture sold to the CIA based on a loose amalgamation of methods from the old KUBARK manual, reverse-engineering of SERE training techniques, and learned helplessness theory, show why this ad hoc model amounted to pseudoscience, and then catalog what the actual science of torturing human brains – available in 2001 – reveals about the practice. We conclude with a discussion of how process of policy-making might incorporate countervailing evidence to ensure that policy problems are forestalled, via the concept of an evidence-based policy brake, which is deliberately instituted to prevent a policy going forward that is contrary to law, ethics and evidence.

The info is here.

Inside the CIA's Black Site Torture Room

Larry Siems
The Guardian
Originally posted October 9, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Jessen, who interrogated Rahman six times over a two-week period, and Mitchell, who met with him once, claimed throughout the lawsuit that they tried to mitigate the harsh conditions of Rahman’s confinement. But cables show it was Jessen who debated whether to subject Rahman to enhanced interrogations techniques with CIA headquarters, and it was Jessen whose advice held sway when he and Zirbel plotted Rahman’s interrogation. “He could tell that [the site manager] was running all of his suggestions through his ‘bullshit filter,’” the investigator notes from his interview with the psychologist, but “Jessen said he was the guy with all the tricks”.

Zirbel accepted Jessen’s suggestion that when Rahman complained that he was cold, he was using a sophisticated al-Qaida resistance technique. When Rahman “claimed inability to think due to conditions (cold),” “complained about poor treatment,” and “complained about the violation of his human rights”, as a cable recorded after one of Jessen’s interrogations, these were evidence, Jessen said, of a “health and welfare” resistance strategy.

The article is here.

Psychologists are facing consequences for helping with torture. It’s not enough.

Roy Eidelson
The Washington Post
Originally posted October 13, 2017

In August, two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, settled a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three former CIA detainees. The psychologists were accused of designing, implementing and overseeing the CIA’s experimental program of torture and abuse (for which their consulting firm received tens of millions of dollars). The evidence against them was compelling: a detailed Senate report, multiple depositions, newly declassified documents and even Mitchell’s memoir . Prior to settling, Mitchell and Jessen denied any legal responsibility, and their attorneys argued their inculpability by comparing them to the low-level technicians whose employers provided lethal gas for Hitler’s extermination camps.

As a psychologist who has spent the past decade working with colleagues and other human rights advocates to reset my profession’s moral compass against torture, I recognize this settlement as an achievement, even if it’s not the damning finding of liability I would have preferred. The case marks the first instance of legal accountability of any kind for psychologists who abandoned ethical standards — and basic decency — while claiming they were merely following government orders on torture. Getting to this point was an uphill battle. And there’s still a long way to go before psychologists’ participation in torture is ended for good.

The article is here.

CIA Psychologists Settle Torture Case Acknowledging Abuses

Peter Blumberg and Pamela Maclean
Bloomberg News
Originally published August 17, 2017

Two U.S. psychologists who helped design an overseas CIA interrogation program agreed to settle claims they were responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case.

The ACLU called the accord “historic” because it’s the first CIA-linked torture case of its kind that wasn’t dismissed, but said in a statement the terms of the settlement are confidential.

The case, which was set for a U.S. trial starting Sept. 5, focused on alleged abuses in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at secret “black-site” facilities that operated under President George W. Bush. The lawsuit followed the 2014 release of a congressional report on Central Intelligence Agency interrogation techniques.

The claims against the psychologists, who worked as government contractors, were filed on behalf of two suspected enemy combatants who were later released and a third who died in custody as a result of hypothermia during his captivity. All three men were interrogated at a site in Afghanistan, according to the ACLU.

ACLU lawyer Dror Ladin has said the case was a novel attempt to use the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act to fix blame on U.S. citizens for human-rights violations committed abroad, unlike previous cases brought against foreigners.

The article is here.

The Torturers Speak

The Editorial Board
The New York Times
Originally posted June 23, 2017

It’s hard to watch the videotaped depositions of the two former military psychologists who, working as independent contractors, designed, oversaw and helped carry out the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees held at C.I.A. black sites in the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The men, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, strike a professional pose. Dressed in suits and ties, speaking matter-of-factly, they describe the barbaric acts they and others inflicted on the captives, who were swept up indiscriminately and then waterboarded, slammed into walls, locked in coffins and more — all in the hunt for intelligence that few, if any, of them possessed.

One died of apparent hypothermia.

Many others were ultimately released without charge.

When pushed to confront the horror and uselessness of what they had done, the psychologists fell back on one of the oldest justifications of wartime. “We were soldiers doing what we were instructed to do,” Dr. Jessen said.

Perhaps, but they were also soldiers whose contracting business was paid more than $81 million.

The information is here.

Nuremberg Betrayed: Human Experimentation and the CIA Torture Program

Sarah Dougherty and Scott A. Allen
Physicians for Human Rights
June 2017

Based on an analysis of thousands of pages of documents and years of research, Physicians for Human Rights shows that the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program constituted an illegal, unethical regime of experimental research on unwilling human subjects, testing the flawed hypothesis that torture could aid interrogators in breaking the resistance of detainees. In “Nuremberg Betrayed: Human Experimentation and the CIA Torture Program,” PHR researchers show that CIA contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen created a research program in which health professionals designed and applied torture techniques and collected data on torture’s effects. This constitutes one of the gravest breaches of medical ethics by U.S. health personnel since the Nuremberg Code was developed in the wake of Nazi medical atrocities committed during World War Two.

Delving into the role health professionals played in designing and implementing torture, the report uses newly released documents to show how the results of untested, brutal torture techniques were used to calibrate the machinery of the torture program. The large-scale experiment’s flawed findings were also used by Bush administration lawyers to create spurious legal cover for the entire program.

PHR calls on all medical and scientific communities to convene a commission to lay out what is known about the torture program, including the participation of health professionals, and urges the Trump administration to launch a criminal investigation to get a full accounting of the crimes committed by the CIA and other government agencies.

The report is here.

Psychologist contractors say they were following agency orders

Pamela MacLean
Bloomberg News
Originally posted May 5, 2017

A pair of U.S. psychologists accused of overseeing the torture of terrorism detainees more than a decade ago face reluctance from a federal judge to let them question the CIA’s deputy director to show they were only following orders.

The judge indicated at a hearing Friday that the psychologists should be able defend themselves in the 2015 lawsuit without compromising government secrecy around the exact role Gina Haspel played in the agency’s overseas interrogation program years before she was tapped to be second in command by the Trump administration.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the case on behalf of three ex-prisoners, one of whom died in custody, is urging the judge not to let the psychologists’ lawyers question Haspel and a retired Central Intelligence Agency official. While the defendants want to demonstrate their actions were approved by the agency, the ACLU says that won’t shield them from liability.

The article is here.

Psychologist recounts interrogation of terror detainee

Shawn Vestal
Spokesman-Review
Originally published January 25, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Jessen’s account was part of a series of documents recently released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU, which has filed a lawsuit against Jessen and his former business partner, James Mitchell. The interview represents the fullest public description of his role from Jessen, who lives in Spokane and operated a for-profit interrogation firm downtown staffed with former Fairchild Air Force Base officers. He has repeatedly denied interview requests from reporters.

The lawsuit against the two contractors is proceeding through federal court in Spokane. Rahman, through his family, is one of three named plaintiffs.

Jessen was interviewed as part of the CIA investigation into Rahman’s death at a “black site” known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan in 2002. Rahman was a suspected Afghan militant and the CIA records refer to him as a member of al-Qaida.

In his interview, Jessen said his role varied from observer to hands-on interrogator, but makes clear he was closely involved. Another document says Jessen had six “sessions” with Rahman.

The article is here.

How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds

by Matt Apuzzo, Sheri Fink, and James Risen
The New York Times
Originally published October 10, 2016

Before the United States permitted a terrifying way of interrogating prisoners, government lawyers and intelligence officials assured themselves of one crucial outcome. They knew that the methods inflicted on terrorism suspects would be painful, shocking and far beyond what the country had ever accepted. But none of it, they concluded, would cause long lasting psychological harm.

Fifteen years later, it is clear they were wrong.

Today in Slovakia, Hussein al-Marfadi describes permanent headaches and disturbed sleep, plagued by memories of dogs inside a blackened jail. In Kazakhstan, Lutfi bin Ali is haunted by nightmares of suffocating at the bottom of a well. In Libya, the radio from a passing car spurs rage in Majid Mokhtar Sasy al-Maghrebi, reminding him of the C.I.A. prison where earsplitting music was just one assault to his senses.

And then there is the despair of men who say they are no longer themselves. "I am living this kind of depression," said Younous Chekkouri, a Moroccan, who fears going outside because he sees faces in crowds as Guantanamo Bay guards. "I'm not normal anymore."

The article is here.

Do No Harm: The American Psychological Association wavers on its detainee policy

Susan Greene
The Colorado Independent
Originally published August 04, 2016

The American Psychological Association is wavering on a year-old policy designed to prevent psychologists from working with military or national security detainees.

Meeting in Denver for its annual convention, the nation’s largest professional association of psychologists this week considered and then postponed a decision on whether to allow members of the profession back to work at Guantanamo Bay, other military detention centers and CIA sites.
After a vote planned for Wednesday and then today, the group’s 173-member governing council tabled the discussion until February.

The debate stems from psychologists’ controversial role assisting the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in so-called “enhanced interrogation” efforts during George W. Bush’s administration. The post-9/11 program tried to squeeze information out of terror suspects detained at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantánamo in Cuba and other sites by waterboarding, isolation and sleep deprivation – methods that international law deems to be torture. Bush’s justice officials were able to legally justify the interrogations on grounds that doctors’ mere presence assured that the tactics were safe.

The updated article is here.

Psychologists admit harsh treatment of CIA prisoners but deny torture

By Nicholas K. Geranios
The Associated Press
Originally published June 22, 2016

Two former Air Force psychologists who helped design the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects acknowledge using waterboarding and other harsh tactics but deny allegations of torture and war crimes leveled by a civil-liberties group, according to new court records.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued consultants James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen of Washington state last October on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, including one who died, creating a closely watched case that will likely include classified information.

In response, the pair’s attorneys filed documents this week in which Mitchell and Jessen acknowledge using waterboarding, loud music, confinement, slapping and other harsh methods but refute that they were torture.

“Defendants deny that they committed torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, nonconsensual human experimentation and/or war crimes,” their lawyers wrote, asking a federal judge in Spokane to throw out the lawsuit and award them court costs.

The article is here.

Newly released CIA files expose grim details of agency interrogation program

by Greg Miller, Karen Deyoung And Julie Tate
The Washington Post
Originally posted June 14, 2016

The CIA released dozens of previously classified documents Tuesday that expose disturbing new details of the agency’s treatment of terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, including one who died in Afghanistan in 2002 after being doused with water and chained to a concrete floor as temperatures plunged below freezing.

The files include granular descriptions of the inner workings of the CIA’s “black site” prisons, messages sent to CIA headquarters from field officers who expressed deep misgivings with how detainees were being treated and secret memos raising objections to the roles played by doctors and psychologists in the administration of treatment later condemned as torture.

But the collection also includes documents that were drafted by senior CIA officials to defend the interrogation program as it came under growing scrutiny, including a lengthy memo asserting that the use of often brutal methods had saved thousands of civilian lives.

The 50 documents included in the release were all drawn from records turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of its multi-year probe of the interrogation program.

The article is here.

Judge Grants Torture Victims Their First Chance to Pursue Justice

Jenna McLaughlin
The Intercept
Originally published April 22, 2016

A civil suit against the architects of the CIA’s torture program, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, will be allowed to proceed, a federal judge in Spokane, Washington, decided on Friday.

District Judge Justin Quackenbush denied the pair’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit launched against them on behalf of three victims, one dead, of the brutal tactics they designed.

“This is amazing, this is unprecedented,” Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union representing the plaintiffs, told The Intercept after the hearing. “This is the first step towards accountability.”

The article is here.

CIA Torture is Unfinished Business

By Human Rights Watch
Posted December 1, 2015

Obama administration claims that legal obstacles prevent criminal investigations into torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are unpersuasive, and risk leaving a legacy of torture as a policy option, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Sufficient evidence exists for the attorney general to order criminal investigations of senior United States officials and others involved in the post-September 11 CIA program for torture, conspiracy to torture, and other crimes under US law.

The 153-page report, “No More Excuses: A Roadmap to Justice for CIA Torture,” sets out evidence to support the main criminal charges that can be brought against those responsible for state-sanctioned torture, and challenges claims that prosecutions are not legally possible. The report also outlines US legal obligations to provide redress to victims of torture, and steps the US should take to do so. It also details actions that other countries should take to pursue criminal investigations into CIA torture.

The post is here.

CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation

By Spencer Ackerman
The Guardian
Originally posted June 15, 2015

The Central Intelligence Agency had explicit guidelines for “human experimentation” – before, during and after its post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees – that raise new questions about the limits on the agency’s in-house and contracted medical research.

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.

CIA director George Tenet approved abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, designed by CIA contractor psychologists. He further instructed the agency’s health personnel to oversee the brutal interrogations – the beginning of years of controversy, still ongoing, about US torture as a violation of medical ethics.

The entire article is here.

Why there would have been no torture without the psychologists

By Steven Reisner
Slate
Originally published December 12, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

The psychologists were vital to the torture program for one additional reason: The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had determined that the presence of psychologists and physicians, monitoring the state and condition of the prisoner being tortured, afforded protection for the CIA leadership and the Bush administration from liability and potential prosecution for the torture. Later, the OLC applied the same rules to the Defense Department’s “enhanced interrogation program,” which, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, was created and overseen by a team led by a clinical psychologist, and eventually overseen exclusively by clinical psychologists.

The entire article is here.

Tortured by Psychologists and Doctors

The New York Time Editorial Board
Originally published

Here is an excerpt:

The ghastly new revelation is that two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who devised a list of coercive techniques to be used in questioning prisoners also personally conducted interrogations in which they tortured some C.I.A. detainees. They earned tens of millions of dollars under contracts for those services.

The report also cites other health professionals who participated, including unidentified C.I.A. medical officers or doctors who cleared prisoners for interrogation and played a central role in deciding whether to continue or adjust procedures when a prisoner developed severe medical problems.

The entire article is here.